For the last two months, we have been publishing select posts from the Timetablist, a unique aviation blog dedicated to historic and current airline route maps, route post cards from the last 5 decades. To our younger audiences,especially in Africa, it's a rare glimpse to a bygone age. You can visit the Timetablist and enjoy the rest of the posts from across the world.We thank the dedicated blogger Matt for giving us the permission to reuse this material. This week will bring you the last route maps from Air Afrique and then travel with other airlines across the continent of Africa:
The penultimate post for Air Afrique Week brings this polychrome poster showing the home ports of the consortium. Little information is available for this print, which was a lot in a New York vintage poster auction in February 2010. While the usual suspects of Air Afrique's destinations from Brazzaville to Bamako, Douala to Dakar, Freetown to Fort-Lamy are evident, this low-resolution preview doesn't reveal many of the details.
The auction catalogue gives a date of 1950, but this is more than a decade before Air Afrique was incorporated. Perhaps, given the vintage, this was willful rather than a matter of record.
Air Afrique: Route Map Poster c.1962
It seems that, near the crane-like yellow and blue bird straddling the Nigeria-Cameroon border are some mysterious destinations, and the oval inset map shows a zebra-stripe of trans-Saharan routes by the dozen, including what looks to be some very easterly swings, suggesting something like a Bangui-to-Budapest or Malabo-to-Moscow, which is fantasy.
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